November 18, 2011

When I started posting links of interest to freelance developmental editors to The Editor’s POV in April, my general sense was that editors and editing were rarely, very rarely, mentioned in the prolific online conversation about publishing and self-publishing.

“There are some things you can figure out on your own. There are other things you want to be taught by an experienced professional, to shorten the learning curve. And finally there are those things that you may never be great at, and that you hire help for. Part of a successful career is understanding the difference between these things, based on your aptitude, time, and resources.”

One of Jane Friedman’s key points, I think, is that editors help authors push themselves to higher quality, and that quality matters.

“When you look at peak-performing experts, you’ll often see that they have either coaches, involved mentors, or a pack of growth-oriented friends that help them excel. … Past the ‘competent’ stage of skill acquisition, it gets increasingly harder to both observe what you’re doing and find quick and easy answers as to how to improve. … You need feedback from outsiders to uncover more opportunities for improvement.”

"The key for a writer is to sort through all the facts,opinions and flat out lies being thrown about, figure out their own situation, decide where they want to be as an author in the future, and the smartly and courageously choose their own path."

When I was at Northwest Bookfest in September, I chatted with a woman who tried to convince me that editing could be seen as marketing, because it made the product better. I still can’t wrap my mind entirely around that idea—but it starts to seem a bit more plausible when you hear a reader talk about the downside of e-publishing:

“for now there are enough products being published traditionally to supply most of us readers with enough decent-quality content to keep us supplied with all the books we can read. So I don’t need to go looking through thousands of Smashwords books for the handful of gems I am sure are there. Will I miss out on some good books? Yes, but I already can’t read all the books I want to read so I can live with that.”

"Virtually none of [the self-published books have] even had the treatment that traditional publishing would provide. It is this treatment which transforms a manuscript into a book and it is this treatment that all books, regardless of the way they are born, should go through before they are presented to the reading public. The treatment includes professional editing (objectively helping to shape the prose and flow of the book), proofreading, continuity/conflict checking, permission checking when quotations or song lyrics have been used, cover design, and providing a readable and eye-pleasing page layout. As far as I am concerned without such treatment a manuscript is still a manuscript."